Seeing a book you really enjoyed made into a movie can be a painful and exhilarating experience.Â You want to see the movie turn out wonderfully, but you are also so afraid that they will mess something up.Â This was a subject of constant debate in the kingdom of nerds while Lord Of The Rings was being made.Â I would be in a state of being constantly mortified if I ever heard that Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was being made into a film.Â Some books change your life forever and to see them in less than that perfect light can be so painful.Â This movie wasn’t on quite that same level, but it was pretty close at times.

Starting this March 4th, now available from Paramount Vantage, is the latest film written and directed by Sean Penn, Into The Wild.Â Pick up this fascinating movie rendition of John Krakauer’s groundbreaking non-fiction book today.

This is the story of Christopher McCandless, a child of privilege who decides to sell or give away almost everything he has to escape his sense of a living death.Â He renames himself Alexander Supertramp and travels across America, meeting up with all sorts of people along the way.Â The whole time, his goal is to make it north to Alaska.Â He does and he lives a wonderful life up there until things go tragically wrong.

As far as special features go for this movie, there are not any.Â You can see previews of other films coming out from Paramount, but nothing else.Â With as grand a story as this one, I’m sure most viewers would have wanted to see something from behind the scenes.Â Even a lame featurette about what it was like to work on a film directed by Sean Penn.Â Yet there is nothing at all.

This movie does a wonderful job of taking all the right things from the book.Â The old man character is expanded just the right amount, Alex is made to seem more competent in the wilderness than the book talks about him being, and he is also portrayed as more of a whining child with his own problems and significant faults.Â Emile Hirsch is amazing in this role, far better than I certainly thought he would have been after seeing him in The Girl Next Door.Â Sean Penn is wonderful as a director, yet it’s the scenery of Alaska which really takes the cake.

Into The Wild is a story about the hunt for adventure inside of each one of us.Â It is at once a tale about freedom and chasing our dreams and a cautionary tale of how fickle we all are and how what we most want can kill us.

1 user commented in " Movie Review: Into The Wild "

McCandless’s story is tragic, but then so many people have benefited from hearing it… a couple of years of hitchhiking led to his story challenging thousands (millions?) of people to reexamine their lives

Leave A Reply

Username (*required)

Email Address (*private)

Website (*optional)

Advertisements

BloggerNews On The Air

We are pleased to announce our latest endeavor, Blogger News is now sponsoring some radio shows on Blog Talk Radio. You can check our full schedule, and listen to previous broadcasts here, and we hope that you will join us on the air in this new venture.